Gazing out the window of a Leinster House or Parnell Square office perhaps one of those tasked with drafting or touching up the Sinn Féin election manifesto had a retro moment.
Amidst the coma-inducing mix of promises to look after your every need from conception – actually scratch that as you are on your own until you survive various rights-proofing tests to determine when it’s not okay to terminate you – to death (by granted-aided euthanasia perhaps) there was a remembrance of times past.
Times when the Shinners were revolutionaries rather than dull social democratic managers, actual ones north of the border and aspirant ones this end. So, inspired maybe by the dusting image on the wall of one of the long dead heroes of renown the manifesto editor decides that the now mothballed Revolution must get a namecheck. Albeit only in the context of the promise to “revolutionise youth mental health.” What does it mean? Do I want to know?
At the risk of being considered facetious or even acerbic, this is the problem here. 180 tedious pages of outlining the “Choice for Change” can be boiled down to what every opposition party with a shout of power does: promise all sorts of stuff to gazzump the sitting government on welfarism.
That’s the game. Sure, there are even Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil TDs and some former senior ministers promising things that they never got around to doing when they had the chance. So, if the Shinners can be accused of chancing their arm with regards to what they will do and where they will get the money to do it, then they are in their Granny’s. They can at least with unblushing cheeks claim that they’ve never had the chance before.
Despite the personal hostilities and residual cultural chasm, there is no deep philosophical or ideological difference between Sinn Féin and the two main parties. The Greens are further to the left on most of the issues that now constitute the stuff of post-socialist leftist politics. Lads in fabulous frocks, unending austerity in the pursuit of “climate justice”, and unlimited immigration.
The Shinners have been cute enough to hand the more naïve Ógra people Mao colouring books and jettison all that nonsense for the time being. Shorn of the Twitter fawning over Ché and the Red Army and MLA’s drinking coffee out of “class” hammer and sickle mugs Sinn Féin are no more left in any fundamental economic sense than either of the two main coalition partners.
They do not support state ownership as a means to run key parts of the economy and they have long since jettisoned the more radical decentralised cooperativism that once characterised Irish republican nationalism. Nor do they even propose to address the dangerous reliance of the Irish economy on multinational capital, much less doing anything that doesn’t fit within EU budgets and policy.
What they are reduced to then is promising lots of free stuff mediated by the state. Which is not socialism, it is welfarism which is nothing more than a means to ensure that the least successful or fortunate are not forced to live in hopeless poverty. Which is a good thing, obviously. Reducing people to spiritually destructive lifelong state dependency by having the “government” cater for their every need “from cradle to grave” is not.
Perhaps that is a bit of an exaggeration of the substance of what Sinn Féin are about but when you are trying to entice voters by promising everyone €10 a day for childcare it really smacks of that sort of desperation. What is the difference between that and offering someone a tenner or a few pints to vote for you? It is not a vision of anything approaching what Sinn Féin once stood for.
As others have pointed out, the fundamental problem facing Sinn Féin and the entire left opposition is that in a time of a full public purse and following a Budget that covered most of the bases of welfarism and marginal tax concessions then it is a bit like playing no limits poker against the lad who has the house money behind him.
It is virtually impossible to outbid him and if you try to then you run the risk of looking foolish by promising things that no one including yourselves really believes are deliverable. Nor are you able to convince that you have the collateral to pay the vig.
Which also applies to the policy area where Sinn Féin has been perceived to have a real edge, which is housing. It is a real weakness on the part of the current administration as waiting lists grow, targets fail to be met and the costs of buying and renting rise to levels that make it difficult for many people to find a place to live. Which is a definite factor in tens of thousands of younger people emigrating.
Sinn Féin ought to be on strong ground here but even they have been forced to up the ante and are now pledging to build 300,000 houses within the five years of the next government. That’s 60,000 a year. In 2020 they were promising 20,000 houses a year for five years.
The costs of this are slightly obscure, or obscured perhaps. In 2020 they were saying that the 100,000 new houses would cost €6.5 billion although that might have referred solely to public and affordable housing.
Now they mention a cost of €7.4 billion for public housing but in a table outlining proposed capital expenditure over 5 years housing accounts for €18.7 billion which does not include “a further €9,948 million of non-Voted capital expenditure which is AHB Expenditure classified as general government expenditure for the purposes of calculating the General Government Balance.” It reminds me of when their future Minister for Finance back in 2015 decided that “off balance” funding was the answer to anyone asking how Sinn Féin would pay for the water services.
In sum then, Sinn Féin are no different to the current government in having had to radically increase their housing targets and the costs of meeting them in the face of rapid population growth driven for the much greater part by inward migration – which bear in mind is supposed to be an unmitigated revenue benefit.
Migration is something that neither the government nor Sinn Féin proposes to address in a meaningful way other than belatedly promising to tackle bogus and illegal immigration. Which is actually a minor component of the overall level of immigration, which is driven by the needs of the economy rather than asylum, genuine or otherwise. Sinn Féin, no more than any of the other establishment parties, has a plan to address that.
At least for those vestigial republicans left within the fold there must surely be some hint of great movement towards national unity if Sinn Féin manage to become the main force in government? There is not.
The reference to unity – the raison d’etre of the republican movement recall – is reduced to a few lines on page 155. Where we are assured that “Sinn Féin in government would work to ensure that the European Union and countries outside of the European Union, actively and economically support Irish reunification.” Inspiring it is not. At least they don’t dig out the border poll snake oil.
I saw a video of a veteran of 60 years almost who was advising the faithful that deep within the greyness of social democratic managerial dullness there still beats the heart of a revolutionary lion. That this is all a cunning subterfuge which will be dialectically resolved when the time is right. Well, if it allows Jim to sleep at night, grand.
In the real world, my impression is that Sinn Féin have abandoned for the moment even the ambition to be the dominant party in the next inevitable coalition. What they are doing – and it is hinted at in the manifesto where all the bad stuff is mostly attributed to “14 years of Fine Gael government” – is to leave the ties open for a possible deal with the other bad guy, Fianna Fáil.
It is not, despite the noise from that quarter, a total non-starter. Unlikely but you never know. If Fianna Fáil do have any historical remembrance of their great times past then at some stage they might start to resent being confined for ever more to being the eternal partners of the Free Staters. Then again, perhaps not. For if we know one thing about our main party leaders it is that vision extends no further than the opening of the next ballot box.
This manifesto is more of the same.